I have a tight schedule this week, so I'm cramming all three Tuesday night shows -- House, Fringe and TheShield -- into one post.

I wasn't that into House's main plotline, involving 13, her self-destructive behavior and her one-night stand's mysterious illness. House firing 13 was a non-starter; we knew she'd be back within an episode or two, if not by the end of the episode.

I did like the subplot involving Wilson (it cracked me up that Wilson obeys the traffic laws of Grand Theft Auto, or at least a game that's supposed to be like GTA). I'm glad that he and House are friends again.

Fringe continues to be entertaining and creepy, but I still get the sense that it's not living up to its full potential. Given its pedigree (Lost and Alias) and similar shows in this vein (The X-Files, the extremely underrated Supernatural), this show could be much more tense on a weekly basis.

Still, tonight's episode was one of the stronger ones, because the team had an actual living victim to rescue, with a rather unsettling threat at work (a drug treatment that turns its users into human microwaves). I wish the dialogue was a little less clunky (how many times have we sat through the hero/heroine chewed out by their superior scene?), and that the show could find more for Lance Reddick to do.

And finally, The Shield: Whoa. The most tension-filled episode of the season, one of the more stomach churning hours of the series. I think I held my breath through that entire interrogation scene, in which Two Man gives up Shane for the attempt on Ronnie's life. Dear lord.

Some other thoughts:

The episode gave us the one of the few Shield moments that involved a classic cop show type moment: protecting a priest from drug dealers. Of course, in classic Shield fashion, the priest had had an affair with a parishoner, and was being blackmailed. But he was still a fairly honest guy, willing to go to jail rather than let his parish get closed down.

A symbol of how far things have come: in season one, Mackey would have been lecturing Dutch -- rather than Billings, as he did here -- about now screwing up a high profile interrogation. But by now, he trusts Dutch to do his job. Of course, Billings has set the bar pretty low for police work, so anything Dutch does makes him look like supercop.

The final scene, with Claudette yelling out of her office at Vic, seemed like a callback to the first episode, when Aceveda was captain, and Vic thought nothing could stop him. Now, what can't stop him?